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Friday, September 18, 2015

Sham Holidays

Having come away so soon in the Union of Conquered
States (i.e., ‘America’)
from fake holidays like Labor Day and Patriot Day, it behooves us to read a few
words from the philosopher Josef Pieper:

The
statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from
worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is
not to be found. To be sure, since the
French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial
festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such
worship, such as the “Brutus Festival” or “Labor Day,” but they all
demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what
religious worship provides to a festival; scarcely nothing could be experienced
more clearly than that genuine festivity is only to be seen where there is
still some living relationship with religious “cult.” Clearer than the light of day is the
difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine, cultic festival and our
artificial festivals that resemble those “maypoles,” cut at the roots, and
carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose. Of course, we have to prepare ourselves for
the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals
(Leisure: The Basis of Culture,
trans. G. Malsbary, South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998 [1948], p.
51).

Just as he warned, artificial festivals are
abounding: Boss’s Day, Women’s Equality
Day, Doughnut Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and so on.

In this over-writing of the Christian calendar we
again hear the death rattle of the West.

But the way of repentance still stands open for
Southerners and all Western peoples; we needn’t chain ourselves to the earth
and sunder ourselves from God by following the new secular calendar. We may once more experience a foretaste of
Heaven on earth, as did our Orthodox forefathers of Europe and Africa, by
following the Orthodox Church’s calendar, which makes time itself a new
creation by filling it with the Grace of God.

So, not Lincoln’s
Birthday but the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Not Constitution Day but the Feasts of the Holy Fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.
Not Arbor Day but the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Not Truman Day but St Ælfred’s Day. As we celebrate in a fitting way these and
other festivals that have a root in real holiness, that same holiness from God
Himself will begin to fill our lives and the world around us. And this is what the Most Holy Trinity has
called us to do as stewards of His creation.